Common Content Marketing Mistakes

By Adam  |  5 Aug 2015 08:00:00

Keeping a blog on your eCommerce website (or indeed any kind of website) is a great way to drive traffic. If somebody visits your site and sees an interesting, regularly updated blog, then they may well decide to come back again later to see what else you've had to say. Equally, if you cover a wide range of topics related to the main subject of your website, then when people search for those subjects they'll find you and as those people must clearly be interested in those subjects, they're all potential customers. But while blogging is something that anyone can do, there are some common mistakes you need to be sure to avoid and I am going to go over them in this blog post.

Not Proofreading
It's a simple thing, yet a surprisingly large number of content marketers and bloggers forget to proofread. Don't get me wrong, it is impossible to completely eliminate mistakes from your writing because you have to take into account human error: so don't feel bad if you realise that you've published something with a misplaced comma or where you've used a wrong word; with blogging, you can rectify those mistakes as soon as you see them. Meanwhile, hugely respected publishers are printing books which will have similar, minor errors, so if they can't completely remove those errors, how can you be expected to do so? But there is an obvious difference between a piece of work that has been proofread, only to have one or two things overlooked, and a piece of work that has not been proofread at all. One will seem like human error on a professional piece, one will seem unprofessional.

Not Sourcing
You want your blog to be reliable and so, every time you make reference to facts which are not things you can explain through words or which are not things you would know as the owner of your business, use a source. You may know for a fact that something happened, but that doesn't mean all of your readers will and if they don't see a source they might think you made it up out of thin air. If you still don't believe in the importance of sources, don't forget that, just recently, a blogger was murdered for writing about something which was entirely true, but the killer believed it was a lie due to the lack of source. See, I didn't source that and you're thinking "that can't be true, can it?" and you're right, it wasn't true! I just used it as an example to highlight how jarring things like that feel when they do not have a source.

Mindless Self-Promotion
A blog should be interesting, it should be informative, it should be engaging and, at times it should be funny. You mustn’t use every blog post to say "My business is great" in hundreds of different ways. Sure, if your business has a particularly good quality to it, or a new feature you want to draw attention to, by all means blog about it. Just make sure that the self-promotion blog posts are not the norm and that you focus more on providing new and original content. More people are going to be interested in non-promotional content than will be interested in promotional-content, which means that, ironically, non-promotional content might be better at bringing people to your website.

So if you're using Sellr for your eCommerce website, why not make use of our blog system and start your content marketing today? It could well be something that drives lots of new people to your website.